Stranger

Product Description

By the Giller Prize-winning author of The Time in Between, a stirring novel that lays bare the bonds of motherhood, revealing just how far a mother will go to reclaim her stolen child

The profound intelligence and political resonance readers have come to expect from David Bergen are on rich display in his “inventive and electrifying” (Globe and Mail) new novel, Stranger.

Íso Perdido, a young Guatemalan woman, works at a fertility clinic at Ixchel, named for the Mayan goddess of creation and destruction. Íso tends to the rich women who visit the clinic for the supposed conception-enhancing properties of the local lake. She is also the lover of Dr. Mann, the American doctor in residence. When an accident forces the doctor to leave Guatemala, Íso is left behind, pregnant. After the birth, the baby disappears―the doctor’s infertile wife Susan has coolly staked a claim.

Determined to reclaim her stolen daughter, Íso makes her way north through Mexico, eventually crossing illegally into a United States where the rich life in safe zones, walled away from the indigent masses. Travelling without documentation, and with little money, Íso must penetrate this world, and in this place of menace and shifting boundaries, she must determine who she can trust and how much, aware that she might lose her daughter forever.

An ageless story, with its uncanny lake, human monsters, and a stolen child, is freshly recast in a modern setting where themes of dislocation and disruption, exploitation and vulnerability, rich and poor collide to make David Bergen’s Stranger a powerful and affecting novel for our times.

"David Bergen’s command is breathtaking, and Stranger is a work of genius. There is not one sentence out of place in this book, not one missed stitch. This is a novel with the tension of The Road and the moral heft of The Power and the Glory. His work belongs to the world, and to all time. He is one of our living greats.
—Matthew Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

"David Bergen is a writer with perfect instinct for the old traditions of epic storytelling, and also for intricate observation of how people operate, and why they do what they do. Stranger is compressed and intense, its language clear, its story provocative and exciting. Novels as good as this come around rarely―a few in a lifetime."
—Samantha Harvey, author of Dear Thief

David Bergen is the award-winning author of seven previous novels and a collection of short stories. A Year of Lesser was a New York Times Notable Book, and The Case of Lena S. was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. In 2005, Bergen won the Giller Prize for The Time in Between. The Matter with Morris was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2010, won the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Age of Hope was a #1 bestseller and a finalist for Canada Reads 2013.